Fifteen years have passed since I first
began to promote Marcus Bruce Christian (1900-1976) as a
writer and historian worthy of a second look. My study of
Christian began in the early 80s at the University of New
Orleans (UNO), where I taught writing and literature to
freshmen and sophomores, and where Christian’s papers are
stored. I was an outsider in a strange and different world
from that of northern Carolina, southern Virginia,
Baltimore, Maryland, which is the region I call home. Less
than a decade before I arrived in New Orleans Christian was
also in the classrooms of UNO teaching -- history and
poetry. This period of his professorship at UNO was a great
turn around in his life, a bit of saving grace after decades
of living in near poverty and disaster.

Before this UNO experience, my
familiarity with Christian was brief at best -- a poem or
two in one of Arna Bontemps’ poetry anthologies, which
provided a brief sketch of Christian’s life. My work and
sojourn in New Orleans and at UNO, however provided the
opportunity and means to know more about the life of
Christian than I had initially desired or wanted to know.
His letters and diary notes in his archives at UNO opened
up his inner world and his personal and public struggles as
a poet sincerely trying to contribute to the uplift of the
race and at the same time tend to the individual necessity
to keep his head above water, above poverty so that he could
continue his work. In the process of reviewing hundreds of
documents in his archive, I began to identify with him as a
man and as an artist. In a manner, his life, I concluded,
was emblematic of many struggling intellectuals who desired
to make meaningful and worthwhile achievements that would
add much to the greater whole, yet have been excluded from
serious consideration -- from the literary canon.

During this sojourn in New Orleans, I was
also privileged to acquaint myself and make friends with
numerous writers and artists of and living in New Orleans.
These included Yusef Komunyaka, Lee Grue, Tom Dent, Kalamu
ya Salaam, Ahmose Zu-Bolton, James Borders, Mona Lisa Saloy,
and others not so well-known. Most were exceedingly familiar
with Christian on a personal basis as a result of his tenure
at UNO. Few of them, however, found a mentor in him, either
as a fellow poet or on the human of his personal struggles
against the odds. My personal distance from the writer and
his individual quirks may have allowed me to go farther than
others in pursuing the Christian beyond the facade.

My discussions were especially extensive
with Yusef Komunyaka, with whom I spent weeks in the
archives going through Christian’s records—poems, diary
notes, letters--and months of reflection on Christian's life
as an estranged writer. With my few resources I got the
Louisiana Weekly and a New Orleans magazine weekly to print
a few of Christian’s pieces. I thought I might stimulate a
Christian revival. I wanted to encourage a new consideration
of him, though dead, as a cultural resource that should be
given more critical attention. I created a poetry journal
Cricket (which had a short life, only three issues) to
promote Christian and to place him in the company of younger
writers, black and white. I waged a two-year campaign in New
Orleans with my meager resources from teaching at UNO. The
response was slight and has picked up only gradually in the
last fifteen years. Though the response desired has fallen
short of expectation, Christian research advanced.

My question then and now remains: Is
there a place for such a man, such a prolific writer as
Marcus Bruce Christian of New Orleans in the canon of
African-American letters? As fellow black writers, scholars,
intellectuals, educators, do we have a responsibility to
present to our community and to others the fullest possible
picture of ourselves and the manner in which we have
struggled to give expression to ourselves and what we find
dear? My answer to these two propositions, of course, is a
ringing Yes. And, I believe, most progressive
African-American intellectuals would agree.

Just on the basis of the massive
historical material in his archive at UNO, Marcus Bruce
Christian deserves a fuller and broader intellectual
attention. His connection to and writings produced for the
Federal Writers Project make it imperative that his archive
be explored. Not merely to glorify Christian, his archive is
useful in order to review the strategies of the black elite
who believed that a government agency could be used to alter
social perceptions and energize the black masses. For
scholars interested in Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and
Arna Bontemps, Christian's archive can make a contribution
in rounding out their character and provide a worthy
contrast to their ideas and perspectives.

For me, Christian’s literary value is
self-evident. This conclusion is more than subjective.
Anyone who takes a cursory look at his literary production
would arrive at the same conclusion. Some in New Orleans
are indeed doing things to honor Christian. Mackie Blanton
at UNO has helped to establish a community service award in
Christian’s name. Professor Violet Harrington Bryan has
considered the writing of a biography on Christian. But
still Christian is beyond the purview of much of the black
academic world. Obviously, there are other factors, it
seems, that determine what is read and what is studied and
passed on within our communities and our academies.

These negating factors have little to do
with the intrinsic value of Christian’s literary
productions. The crucial factors that retard Christian’s
consideration seem outside of the work itself
(extra-literary). At best these factors are sociological and
at their worst political and economic. Such factors as
geographical isolation, class and religion, social themes,
race, ideology, education, fads and style have affected, I
believe, an academic consideration of Christian as an
African-American intellectual worthy of continual study. I
do not have the space here to discuss all these factors. But
I will touch upon a few of them.

Unlike his contemporaries, Christian did
not gravitate to the urban centers of New York and Chicago.
Nor did he travel far and wide, like Langston Hughes and
Claude McKay. He never left New Orleans, though possessing a
cosmopolitan air, was in many ways a backwater Southern
town, with all the limitations of such out of the way places
-- a curiosity yes, but not enough to make taken seriously
in the determinations of now.

Moreover, in New Orleans, a town where
family background and associates, surname, religion, and
education, residence are important factors, Christian was in
a manner more restricted than he would have been in such
places as New York or Chicago or any great Northern urban
center. Christian was not a New Orleans person by birth and
training. Raised as a country boy and with an agrarian
temperament, New Orleans suited him just fine. With him he
had family and friends and he possessed a sense of
responsibility and commitment to them.

Though he loved the idea and the
potential of New Orleans, Christian was at once trapped and
held up by his agrarian origins, with all of its
aristocratic pretensions, poor yet resourceful, humble in
manners yet exceedingly proud. He was raised in or near
Mechanicsville, a rural town seventy to eighty miles south
of New Orleans. Born in the post-slavery period, his was the
second generation outside of that horrid past. Christian
was among that throng of blacks who moved to the great urban
centers during and after World War I in search of a better
life. Having lost both parents early in life, Christian came
to New Orleans as the head of a family--his siblings. Both
parents were dead by the time Christian was thirteen.

Though he was a researcher and promoter
of New Orleans, and lived most of his life in the city,
Christian, in a manner, remained an outsider. He did not
really fit into New Orleans upper crust black society nor in
its bourgeois professional classes; nor, I believe, did he
want to, at least, not on their terms. For Christian, New
Orleans was more than an idea; it was an ideal, realizable
but yet unrealized, as we can see in his long poem, I AM
ORLEANS. That is, Christian was fascinated by the notion of
different cultures coming together to make something larger,
greater than any of its components.

Christian was Du Boisean in his view of
the social and intellectual world of the Negro. Of course,
he was not quite as pristine as Du Bois in his personal
life. Christian, however, viewed New Orleans through a
certain racial prism. In its actuality New Orleans was
shameless and much of this shamelessness had to do with how
blacks themselves conceived themselves. Christian adopted
the Du Boisean idea that the arts, developing a high culture
based on folk achievements, could elevate the lives of
blacks in America. Christian believed as did Carter G.
Woodson that a knowledge and appreciation of our history
from our point of view would enlightened the Negro masses so
that the stereotypic image of ignorance, backwardness, and
superstition could no longer be used as tools in white
propaganda. In that cultural struggle, with its economic,
political, and moral implications, Christian strove to be a
leader in the New Orleans community with a fairly wide
audience based on his poetry column in The Louisiana Weekly
and his participation in varied literary societies, which
lasted from the mid 30s to the early 50s.

Though derived from a rural aristocratic
tradition, Christian began his life in New Orleans
basically as a working class stiff, as a chauffeur. Though
lacking much classroom training, Christian was highly
literate, even by the time he came to New Orleans at
nineteen. By age twenty-three he had put together a book of
poems, in which he unsuccessfully attempted to publish.
Having dropped out of school to help take care of his
siblings, Christian completed his formal education in night
school. Though he taught poetry and history at UNO for ten
years, Christian never earned a college degree. In his
diaries, he engages in a bit of mockery at the expense of
Sterling Brown and his Phi Beta Kappa key. The lore is that
Christian was forced to resign as a librarian at Dillard
because he was without degree. From the 50s until
rediscovered in the late 60s by UNO, Christian scraped out a
living by various self-printing projects and delivering
papers for the Times Picayune.

Christian was a survivor. In the 20s he
had saved enough money to open a cleaners, a business in
which he was responsible for most of the work, though some
family members seems to have helped him irregularly. Though
blue collar, this work gave him a measure of independence to
write and do research in black life and culture. With the
coming of the Depression in the early 30s, independent and
prideful, Christian refused to go on relief. With the aid
of his patron Lyle Saxon, a well-known, white regional
writer, and with a deal cut in Washington, Christian
obtained a position in the newly created “Dillard Project,”
set up especially to hire blacks and write a black history
of Louisiana. He then had a steady salary slightly more than
$80 a month. But that came to an end in the mid-40s, though
he continued on at Dillard for five or six years. In his
article on Christian, Tom Dent provides an excellent
portrait of the horrors of poverty that Christian suffered
in the 60s. His street and house flooded, he lost
manuscripts and other historical documents; and worse, he
was arrested as a looter in his efforts to salvage his own
property.

Christian was a great collector of
folktales and seemingly received a great deal of pleasure
reciting them. Its harsh realism and self-mockery, its
critical poetic, were the elements he most admired. These
elements can also be found in his own poetry. The majority
of his poems, however, were published in the Crisis and
Opportunity magazines (then the major national organs for
black writers). These tend to be formal rhymed verse—love
poems, protest poems, anti-war poems. His blues, humorous,
and free verse poems were never published independently,
including his long poem I AM NEW ORLEANS.

Until recently, Christian was
anthologized. Bontemps and Hughes saw to that. Since the
1980s, however, Christian has been left out of the major
anthologies. We can only find him now in Jerry Ward’s
anthology TROUBLE THE WATER (1997). I spoke with two of the
editors of THE NEW CAVALCADE (1991), before publication.
Arthur P. Davis was familiar with Christian, but not the UNO
archive. I made Joyce Joyce familiar with a number of
Christian poems. Neither Joyce nor Davis followed up on my
suggestions and Christian was not included in the
anthology.

Henry Louis Gates also excluded Christian
from his Norton anthology (1997), which I believe, resulted
from ignorance and laziness and conceptual flaws. These
large anthologies, however, determine who is studied and who
is not in schools and colleges. Those editors who have
pushed Christian aside have made a critical error, if our
interest is to know the full story of black writers in the
30s and 40s, a period in which he made great contributions
in poetry and prose, in research and creativity.

In the last decade, my efforts have gone
toward putting together a coherent view of Christian. As far
as I know, other than Tom Dent, I am the only scholar who
has looked at Christian in conjunction with his poetry. I am
the only writer who has tied his letters and diary notes and
his poetry so as to sketch out Christian’s character and
private life. My writings, however, have not had a broad
reading. Surely, they are not known as well as Dent’s
article, which is a reminiscence and only secondarily about
Christian’s poetry. Dent, however, believed that
Christian’s poems and “History of Black Louisiana” should
be published.

As an independent scholar, I have
appeared at several conferences, the CLA and the Zora Neale
Hurston Society, to encourage academics to take up
Christian’s banner. There is a need for much more critical
readings of his letters and diary notes. I want professors
to include him in their courses and teachings about black
writers of the 30s and 40s, to encourage the publication of
his writings. Those black professor who work at universities
with presses could be influential.

Christian writings contain portraits of
Hughes, Bontemps, Sterling Brown, and other major figures of
the period. Black academics have greater resources and means
than I to encourage other writers to take a fresh look at
Christian. I greatly encourage others to write about
Christian. At the university, a new generation can be
introduced to what was going on in other places besides New
York and Chicago. Outside of these arenas, Christian is a
major literary figure, in which Sterling Brown and others
depended on greatly for a view of New Orleans and Louisiana.

To aid academics in this promotion of the
work and life of Marcus Bruce Christian. I have pulled
together a bio-bibliographical list to facilitate a
reconsideration of Christian and his work. (See the attached
below.) This document substantiates, I believe, the regard
in which many editors of magazines and journals held
Christian. This regard has waned in the last two decades. To
reenergize an interest in Christian, an extraordinary black
scholar, this material can be freely reproduced.

·Appointed
to Federal Writers’ Project, Dillard University, New Orleans,
at a rate of $82.50 a month,April 6, 1936

·Elmer
Anderson of Opportunity magazine sent “Men on Horseback” to W.C. Handy for it to be put to music, August 5, 1936

·Christian
corresponded with George Schulyer, author of
Black No More, March 26, 1937

·Received
letter from Mrs. Roosevelt, April 2, 1937

·Sterling
Brown requested scholarly help from Christian, for his “The
Portrait of the Negro as American”September 15, 1937

·Appointed
unit supervisor, 1939; Became an authority on the folklore and
history of the Black man in Louisiana; he began collecting
material during the depression when working on the Federal
Writer’s project

·Received
love letter from Irene Douglas, dated January 19, 1942

·Christian
proposed a university press at Dillard, letter to A.W. Dent,
December 26, 1942